Many-body phase transitions in a non-Hermitian Ising chain

TL;DR

This paper investigates many-body phase transitions in a non-Hermitian Ising chain, revealing multiple phase transitions including second-order and PT transitions, with detailed analysis of their spectral and entanglement properties.

Contribution

It provides an exact solution for identifying and characterizing multiple phase transitions in a non-Hermitian many-body quantum system.

Findings

Identifies a second-order phase transition in the ground state.

Discovers two PT phase transitions with exceptional points.

Develops finite-size scaling to extract central charge.

Abstract

We study many-body phase transitions in a one-dimensional ferromagnetic transversed field Ising model with an imaginary field and show that the system exhibits three phase transitions: one second-order phase transition and two $\mathcal{PT}$ phase transitions. The second-order phase transition occurring in the ground state is investigated via biorthogonal and self-normal entanglement entropy, for which we develop an approach to perform finite-size scaling theory to extract the central charge for small systems. Compared with the second-order phase transition, the first $\mathcal{PT}$ transition is characterized by the appearance of an exceptional point in the full energy spectrum, while the second $\mathcal{PT}$ transition only occurs in specific excited states. Furthermore, we interestingly show that both of exceptional points are second-order in terms of scalings of imaginary parts of the energy. This work provides an exact solution for many-body phase transitions in non-Hermitian systems.